HE'S THE irascible, reclusive creator of the world’s most expensive painting by a living artist, has a legendary appetite for much younger women and has as many as 40 children.

When Lucian Freud’s relationship with his former nude model and muse Emily Bearn was on the rocks, he paid a late-night visit to the £500,000 house in West London that he was assumed to have bought for her.

“Lucian came striding down the pavement looking very angry,” a neighbour recalled. “Emily wouldn’t let him in and he started kicking the door and shouting. He was making a lot of noise.”

There is nothing so remarkable about that story of parting lovers, apart from one aspect: Bearn was 29 and Freud was 80.

Frequently described as Britain’s greatest living painter – although not by those who were outraged at his notorious “five o’clock shadow” portrait of the Queen – Freud this week became the world’s most expensive living artist.

Freud's portrait of Kate Moss

One of his trademark fleshy nudes was sold at Christie’s in New York for £17.2million, easily outstripping the previous record-holder, pop artist Jeff Koons, and making Damien Hirst look positively bargain basement.

It is yet another landmark for the man who holds two of Britain’s most exclusive honours, the Order of Merit and the Companion of Honour, and still paints tirelessly at the age of 85.

But in the context of his private life, his creative endeavours seem almost pedestrian. The tally of 40 children which his late friend Daniel Farson once estimated him to have fathered is generally agreed to be an exaggeration.

He famously refuses to paint people he dislikes – turning down Pope John Paul II and Princess Diana.

But when you have clumps of offspring by so many wives and girlfriends that it’s hard to remember their names, and when only a handful of them are permitted to have your phone number, you can’t complain if speculation runs away with itself.

Known as the Hermit of Holland Park after the exclusive West London enclave where he has his studio, he famously refuses to paint people he dislikes – turning down Pope John Paul II and Princess Diana. He once refused a request from Andrew Lloyd Webber to paint his wife Madeleine, claiming he had been “threatened” by the composer “with the offer of free tickets for his shows”.

So private that he would not attend the opening of an exhibition of his work at Tate Britain in 2002, he is nevertheless happy to paint his own daughters in the nude – and at least one of them has said it was the best way of getting to know him.

Rake thin and just 5ft 6in, the octogenarian lothario has struck up close relationships with pregnant celebrities Jerry Hall and Kate Moss and has had a string of affairs with women young enough to be his granddaughters.

His conquests speak of his intense sexual charisma. One said modelling for him “felt like being an apple in the Garden of Eden. When it was over, I felt as if I had been cast out of Paradise”.

RECORD: This painting of Sue Tilley sold for £17.2million

By contrast, other relationships have been poisoned by rancour. He has famously not spoken to his brother Sir Clement Freud – the former MP and doyen of Radio 4’s Just A Minute – for half a century.

The story goes that Lucian turned up at Clement’s club one day in 1955 and told the receptionist to find him urgently. He wanted a loan but Clement was out and by the time he arrived, Lucian had stormed off in a fury. Clement has seen him only once since then, many years ago, when he and his eldest son Dominic bumped into him in a North London ice-cream shop. Lucian fled. “Why did that man go off and leave his ice-cream?” asked Dominic. “It was your Uncle Lucian,” came the reply.

UNFLATTERING: Freud was criticised for his take on the Queen

The sibling rivalry started early. Clement has explained that their mother was much closer to Lucian than she was to him or their elder brother Stephen. “When she came into the nursery, she nodded to Stephen and me and sat down with Lucian and whispered. They had secrets. I did not realise for many years that this is not what good mothers do,” he has said.

In the last years of their mother’s life she became more distant from Clement. He claims he was never even told where her funeral was.

The irony for the dysfunctional Freuds is that they are the family that invented therapy. Lucian’s grandfather was Sigmund Freud, the Viennese father of psychoanalysis. His youngest son Ernst was an architect. He married Lucie Brasch, daughter of a grain merchant, and settled in Berlin, where Lucian was born in 1922. They were well off but Jewish and when Hitler came to power in 1933 they moved to England. Three of Lucian’s great-aunts perished in Auschwitz.

Lucian attended various private schools. Ever the non-conformist, he was expelled from one of them after he exposed his bottom in public for a bet. He went on to three art schools, one of which he set on fire with a careless cigarette stub.

As a young painter he was married first to Kitty, daughter of sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, and had two daughters with her. His father-in-law wrote him off as a “spiv” after their divorce. The marriage had fallen victim to his affair with Lady Caroline Blackwood. She divorced him and later said: “You have a love affair with him if that’s what you want but he hated responsibility and it would have been crazy to have children with him.”

There were no more marriages, just girlfriends. The women he had children with included Suzy Boyt, his former student at the Slade art school; teacher Bernardine Cover­ley; Katherine McAdam, a fashion designer; and painter Celia Paul.

One of this unwieldy brood is novelist Esther Freud, who has described the first time he painted her: “I sat for him when I was 16. That’s how I got to know him. We’d never lived in the same city before.” As far as posing nude was concerned, she added: “I simply took my clothes off and sat on a sofa when he asked. It never occurred to me to be ashamed.”

Another novelist daughter, Rose Boyt, has said sitting for him was “a way of simply being with him. People think there must be an Oedipal thing because of Sigmund Freud but there isn’t. It’s silly to ask such a thing. It’s not as if I’m posing for Playboy or peddling my wares in a red-light district.”

Some 15 half-brothers and sisters meet at reunions every 10 years, which Lucian does not attend. Another daughter, sculptor Jane McAdam, recalled recently: “I see him every few years – sometimes by arrangement, sometimes not – but never in a nice, regular fashion.” But she added: “He gives the best hugs. He cares. You can tell from the hugs, you can tell from that intensity.”

That intensity is part of his appeal to his lovers, too. “Like Svengali, he mesmerises women into capitulation,” Farson said of him. One of his sitters said that being with him was “like putting your finger into an electric socket and being wired up to the national grid”. He sings to his models or quotes poetry by heart. In breaks, he serves them champagne and game. But one ex-lover, the late writer Joan Wyndham, also said that he was “icy in bed – I made love to an intriguing mind and a finely chiselled face. But no more”.

Strikingly few have kissed and told in that way. Emily Bearn has respected Freud’s desire for privacy. Her

successor, Alexandra Williams-Wynn, has also declined to speak about her relationship with a man half a century her senior.

The painting sold this week was of Sue Tilley, a JobCentre manager who posed for Freud in the early Nineties. She had to cover her tattoos with make-up because he didn’t like other colours intruding on her body tone.

He was also fussy when she went on holiday to India and got a suntan. “I got so brown he was repulsed by me and I had to wait about a year for the tan to fade.”

And even though Lucian immortalised her in voluptuous, unflattering detail, she lines up with his other battery of female admirers.

“He’s fantastic, the most amusing person I’ve ever met. It was just very interesting to get lots of chat, lots of stories, to get taken to nice restaurants and to get to meet all the other people he painted.”

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